It has been 10 years of dormancy for the peace movement: a full decade since the thriving demonstrations of the early Bush years gave way to liberal demands that the focus shift to defeating the president at the ballot box. This fixation remained through the two ensuing presidential elections, which have demonstrated, beyond a reasonable doubt, the futility of this approach to altering American foreign policy. The vibrant and young foot soldiers of Obama’s first election are now seven years older, jaded and frustrated. Most of them are underemployed, over-indebted, and increasingly hopeless about their lot in life.

Meanwhile, the elders responsible for luring them into the charade of electoral politics are seeing their safety net whittle away at the hands of an ever-avaricious power elite. This farce of democratic engagement has provided zero dividends, as Americans are worse off than they were a decade ago, and our military posture remains as imperialist and expansive as ever. Some of us resolutely warned against straying off into the electoral forest in 2004, but now is not the time for finger wagging or “I told you so” pronouncements. With the latest vicious bombardment of Palestinians by the Israeli war machine, the concurrent conflagration in Iraq, the rise of a U.S.-backed oligarchy in Ukraine, and continued drone attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia, the time is nigh for a revival of the peace movement.

This isn’t to minimize the significance of other pressing issues, such as wealth inequality, but rather to recognize the immediacy of militarism, together with its encompassing nature. So long as the United States maintains an aggressive military posture, there is little room for social expenditure at the federal level. For now, these battles are best focused in states and municipalities, where gains have slowly been made in recent months. At the national level, all we have seen is Obama’s platitudinous pronouncements in the 2012 State of the Union address. Nothing concrete. No mention has been made of taxing wealth, inheritance or financial transactions, nor of investing in a broad based Green New Deal to jump start the economy in a more efficacious way than the risky bond-buying program at the Federal Reserve, which has done little but prop up the stock market and create the illusion of positive growth.

Let’s give credit: the Occupy movement did a remarkable job at setting the nation’s discourse on inequality, but lacked the capacity to move from there. If anything, its value was that it pointed the finger at the prime culprits: the villains of Wall Street. The corrective action would have to be taken in individual states and cities. Indeed, the impacts of Occupy’s consciousness-raising have been felt via the ensuing Chicago Teachers’ Union strike and the election of Socialist Alternative candidate Kshama Sawant to the Seattle City Council and subsequent passing of the $15/hr minimum wage, to provide just a few examples.

These local battles ought continue, by all means. In fact, it appears that Chicago Teachers’ Union president Karen Lewis is on the verge of officially announcing her campaign for mayor against Rahm Emanuel, with an initial poll giving her a 9-point advantage. If she were to prevail, the result would be a substantial victory against the scourge of inequality, and the decades-long attack on public sector workers in the nation’s third largest city. It would also be a blow to the mainstream of the Democratic Party that has been the primary enabler of the charter school movement, which the Chicago Teachers’ Union has campaigned so steadfastly against. This is a vital issue that needs to be addressed, and is best done through local organizing.

However, our national focus must return to the peace movement. We must recognize our unique position in the world to affect change in Israel/Palestine, as Noam Chomsky notes in a recent piece in the Nation: “As long as the United States supports Israel’s expansionist policies, there is no reason to expect them to cease. Tactics have to be designed accordingly.” He argues, to the frustration of many progressives, that popular opinion in the United States is not yet adequately aligned for BDS to be as effective as its proponents hope. His judgment seems accurate to these eyes, which is precisely why it is so important to focus energies on resurrecting the peace movement from its moribund state. Already, there have been Palestinian solidarity marches in major metropolitan centers throughout the country, which is encouraging. However, these need to be accompanied with teach-ins, lectures, and leafleting activities. Let us see this ongoing tragedy as an opening to excite moral outrage and encourage a new generation of anti-war activists.

In addition to addressing the U.S.’s role in legitimizing Israeli war crimes, a revived peace movement should speak to the ongoing and increasing use of extralegal drone warfare, which poses the terrifying prospect of perpetual robot wars in our future. Even former Obama administration officials admitted in a recent study that drones could lead us down a “slippery slope to wider war.”

We should further address continued clandestine war and influence peddling usedto destabilize certain governments in favor of American puppets. We should illuminate the American role in propping up an oligarchy in Ukraine with fascist elements that have engaged in repeated political assassinations, including the sadistic incineration of 42 pro-Russian activists in Odessa. We can identify this as part of a broader push to expand American military power up to Russia’s doorstep, in violation of the promise of the post-Cold War peace dividend.

This renewed movement should also draw connections between imperial adventure abroad and increasing militarization at home. Indeed, the ACLU has done precisely that with a recent report documenting the sharp rise in SWAT and other war zone tactics by police departments throughout the country. Between the 1980’s and 2005, the overall number of these raids increased from 3,000 a year to 45,000. The report found that only 7% were for “hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios,” i.e. those situations for which SWAT techniques were originally established, while a full 62% were used to apprehend suspected drug offenders.

Meanwhile, a military ethos has captured the American psyche, resulting in the rise of a crude and caustic brand of masculinity: all brawn, no sensitivity. This mirrors imperial hubris abroad and is rooted in a sense of male entitlement. From teenage kids gang-raping a helpless girl in Steubenville to George Zimmerman’s vigilantism and the recurrent spree killings in public buildings throughout the nation, the disease of American militarism does not only ravage innocents abroad. Through decades of disproportionate spending on armaments and the concomitant glorification of war and the warrior, violence has been turned into virtue. How can we pretend to criticize the jihadist abroad when it is precisely this sort of fatalism that we have nurtured at home?

And this is what is so unique about the U.S. compared to empires past. We are at war with ourselves. The spoils of conquest are not returned home and invested in extravagant displays of grandeur like in London, Paris or Moscow. Our cities are ratty shitholes by comparison. Our treasury has been plundered by war-makers for decades, leaving our infrastructure dated and decrepit. We lack the social democratic provisions of any of our industrialized counterparts. We are left with inadequate health care, terribly unequal school systems, and primitive levels of workers’ rights and protections. We are one of only a few nations to not provide maternity leave, likewise with not guaranteeing paid vacation time. While most of our European counterparts are now preparing for their annual 4-6 weeks of summer rest, we’ll plod on through the scorching summer heat, not an end in sight.

How many indignities is the American prepared to suffer before he does something about it? We need the peace movement now because it will enliven and animate all of the aforementioned issues. The repeated assaults on the Palestinian people will not end until Americans take action. The drones in the Middle East and the clandestine warfare in Eastern Europe will not cease until Americans demand it. The permanent posture of war will continue unencumbered until brave Americans stand up and show another way. Our treasury will continue to be looted by the war makers until we pry what is rightfully ours from their dirty, little hands. The path forward is clear: we diligently organize until we are back to the levels of engagement seen during the first few years of this millennium, when millions lined the streets throughout the world in protest, and the New York Times declared us to be the “Second Superpower.” If we can sustain the pressure for years on end, history tells us that we can fundamentally alter foreign policy through public pressure. Hopefully, liberals have learned their lesson about the uselessness of hoping for change from above, and won’t abscond again.

In one of a series of significant talks over the weekend by the world’s foremost Internet freedom activists, Julian Assange spoke on MSNBC about the central “battle” of the Information Age: “On the one hand, we are in many ways heading towards a transnational dystopian total surveillance society the likes of which the world has never seen . . . and on the other, people are coming together. Whenever people can communicate, they develop new values and a new consensus and a new polity. That is something that all young people are exposed to. . . “[1]

In other words, the Internet is the new central terrain of human discourse and conflict, encompassing the full range of human personalities, from the authoritarian to the radical to the entirely banal. That these tendencies have endured the development of new communication technologies is not particularly noteworthy. What is quite interesting is that this new terrain does not generally conform to rigid geographical, social or cultural structures. Information does not flow in one direction, but in any direction, or many directions at once. It is “rhizomatic” in nature. In their seminal work on the subject, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explain: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.”[2]

As Assange references in his interview, previous geopolitical structures have been reformulated or even reversed: activists and journalists now seek refuge FROM the United States, fearing the fate of Chelsea Manning et al. The fact that Snowden finds himself in exile on the other side of the Iron Curtain is especially telling of this. America is now the nucleus of the goon state, encompassing its broad network of security and police forces as well as its army of spooks: the effective antithesis to the rhizomatic realm of near-infinite possibility.

It is not that Russia is any less authoritarian than the United States, but that Putin has no incentive to hand Snowden over, and this is a man frozen in the world of realpolitik. His American counterpart, meanwhile, functions from within the liberal tradition: another dinosaur of a bygone era, desperately seeking to maintain control of a world slipping out of his grips. He has been repeatedly outflanked by Putin on the diplomatic front, because the amorphous blather of bourgeois liberalism stands little chance against stern Slavic nationalism, at least when the latter is the honest broker.

Meanwhile, there is no room for window-dressing in the battle for the Internet. Whether politicians call themselves liberal or conservative, they derive their legitimacy from the support of the victorious villains of the last major technological era: the digital age. It was here that finance capital was revolutionized by the heightened capacity to run complex algorithms and models on arcane investments, giving bankers and hedge fund managers more ways to make money, and also more incentive to skirt regulations by hiding behind the wall of complexity. Meanwhile, the pace of atomization increased dramatically, as union membership plummeted and the country became less community oriented. Traditional gathering places like bowling alleys and bingo parlors began closing en masse, political participation fell, and the public commons were privatized and commodified. Arboreal linkages disappeared all around, and the behemoth banks obliterated the isolated nomads beneath them.

Finance capital won the Battle of the Digital age, with the top 1% realizing some 95% of wealth gains from 2009-2012. A precarious population of baby boomer children rose to fruition, steeped in egregious student debt, facing an economy of permanent precariousness, and then a freshly emergent threat. As digital communication gave way to a nearly universal Internet, at least in wealthy countries, the propensity for a thoroughgoing intelligence and surveillance capacity emerged. J Edgar Hoover’s fantasyland had arrived. The goon component of government and its private counterparts could now gather information on everyone, everywhere. It could squash a radical idea before it had the chance to germinate. It could fire a drone on alleged terrorists from the comfort of a command center. The goon state could entrap defiant political leaders in scandal, like Hoover did, but much more ruthlessly and efficiently. It could strike fear into the young and aspirant, by making quick example of activists peacefully assembled in public parks and pavilions.

At the same time, the Internet allows for transmission of information heretofore unimaginable. It has made the sharing of ideas and political propaganda so seamless that meeting in person seems superfluous. It has allowed for the development of solidarity networks across international borders, and afforded us the opportunity to see through the fog of corporate press bias by permitting access to a broader range of viewpoints and analytical perspectives. The goon state sees its eroding relevance, as the semiotic associations between the state and authority are punctured by little truths the world can access without filter. Deleuze and Guattari say: “[Language] misconstrues the nature of organizations of power, which are in no way located within a State apparatus but rather are everywhere, effecting formalizations of content and expression, the segments of which they intertwine.” [3]

Here we see why Internet freedoms are so terrifying for the antiquated sources of power: the use of signifying language is much more difficult to control where the Internet is un-policed. Both the rigid realm of realpolitik and the glossy ideals of western liberalism become less viable. The state is faced with a crisis of legitimacy unseen since the end of World War II. It has been placed on the defensive alongside those that finance it and prop it up. Its reaction has been brutal crackdowns in the physical space of public gatherings, and total surveillance in the rhizomatic realm of cyberspace. It has, meanwhile, used old religious and political signifiers to drum up paranoia for public support: “our” way of life is threatened by a plethora of “others.”

But an increasingly desperate human population seeks any alternative, with the rallying cry “another world is possible.” In fact, there are numerous other worlds that are possible. To speak of just “one” is antithetical to progress: it is falling back into the dialectical trap of there being a magical panacea. Other worlds are always inevitably coming in and out of existence, as technology drives fundamental changes in economy and society, which then fuel adaptations in political structures. The United States, a child of the British Empire, surpassed the latter as preeminent superpower during the age of television: a veritable empire of images. It was eclipsed in kind by its own Frankenstein’s Monster during the digital age, as the financial behemoths came to reign. Now we have the nebulous age of the Internet: the era of instant communication in all directions, and yet also of thriving goons and spooks.

It is not just in cyberspace, but also real physical space that one sees ascendant goonism. The United States sports the highest incarceration rate in the world, as well as a private security industry that is booming through the recession. But the goon state is broader than specific structures: it runs right to the core character of the country. Witness the ageism of resentful baby-boomers, who treat fully grown young adults with a brash authoritarianism, sloughing them off as dumb “kids.” Their counterparts in blue give a more brutal treatment, crashing billy club to skull whence civically engaged young people populate public parks. The quip as one stands picketing on a street corner is “Go get a job!,” despite an economy specifically designed to offer few lasting employment prospects. The idea is to mold these upstarts into the stereotypical American: boorishly proud, a fan of all things violent, especially his football, stubbornly determined in his way: the very face of hubris.

In the foreign policy realm, the American prime directive has been the transmission of goon-ism everywhere and anywhere. It runs a worldwide rendition program, special-ops wars in all corners of the earth, and a robust drone program of extrajudicial slaughter of supposed terrorists and their associates. The goon state is America’s great contribution to the culture of the world. From Chile and Guatemala to Egypt, Ukraine and Georgia, and many places betwixt and between. It has become an Empire of the crude and vile: a relentless dance with the devil in the muckiest of mucks.

We can only hope that goons don’t do well with rhizomes. Already we have seen the goon state try to persecute Julian Assange, and yet he is able to participate in forums, and deliver speeches to crowds on other continents. Ditto for Glenn Greenwald , Edward Snowden and Laura Poitras: all marooned to varying degrees by the goon state, yet virtually free in the rhizomatic realm of the Internet. Of course, we are still restrained by the hard realities of physical space, and the residual arboreal linkages that exist therein. We still find ourselves in a terrible economic predicament, left over from the looting and trashing committed by the financial elite during the digital age. We still face hardship as a human population, with poverty, hunger and climate change presenting unprecedented peril to this precious species. Yet, in our war with the goons, we may just be at an advantage.

]]>0mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=582012-12-17T20:10:04Z2012-12-17T11:47:33ZSadly, we have seen another dreadful spree killing followed by the typical array of responses from commentators evading the underlying sociological and psychological causes. We hear abundant talk about the “culture of violence in America,” in addition to political posturing about gun laws and access to adequate mental health care. These are not irrelevant factors, to be sure, but they are not causal. It is like explaining the persistence of inner-city poverty by pointing towards the substandard public school systems therein, rather than recognizing these factors as intertwined and related to a larger sociological malaise: namely, inequality. As I wrote in response to the Batman rampage this summer: “The first tragedy is the violent act, and the second is the unresponsiveness of society. Both of these are rooted in a hyperactive ego, aggravated by the forces of alienation, de-socialization and the heightened automation of American existence.”

James Holmes, the 'Batman killer.' How can we cure the deep resentment which leads to mass killings?

Batman killer James Holmes and Sandy Hook killer Adam Lanza were both described as introverted and reclusive by peers. This description has been a constant through the decades of these incidents. Furthermore, the perpetrators have generally had no known history of violent aggression, or even a recorded history of mental illness. Despite this, many liberals advance the psychological-deterministic viewpoint that more robust mental health care would end these recurring episodes. Surely, there are a whole host of reasons the United States needs to invest in public preventative psychiatric care, but this misses the core cause of these massacres. In fact, the underlying problem plaguing the offenders is unlikely to get captured by mental health workers, because their subdued personality makes it so the first readily visible sign of malaise occurs with their violent release.

Furthermore, psychological disorders do not exist in a vacuum. They are a reflection of dysfunction within society, especially when this recurrent. I am certain that the pharmaceutical industry would love for psychiatrists to invent a new branch of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) with suggested treatment of some cocktail of mind-numbing pills for all patients exhibiting warning signs of introversion. However, this would be equally as destructive as this nation’s frivolous war on drugs, or its war on “hyperactive” children. There is no patch to cover up this blemish on the Disneyland Empire, where all is meant to be jubilant behind the white picket fence. You cannot simply apply varnish and scrub away at a deep-seated sickness.

The fact is that Americans are in a state of denial about their condition. They glance the other way or proffer the aforementioned solutions, refusing to allow for the possibility that we are innately infected. The malady at work here goes to the very heart of what it means to be an American. Specifically, we are an ego-driven society wherein empathy is viewed as weakness. What’s more, a rational and measured tenor tends to get swallowed up in the boisterously egomaniacal personalities that predominate. This is a setting particularly harsh on introverts, and notably male introverts. A quiet and rational composure is viewed as un-cool, if not wholly un-masculine. Meanwhile, smart children and adolescents are often disparaged as “nerds” or “dorks.” Our culture treats its dynamic and intelligent members as “weird” outsiders.

This denigration of the smart kids further promulgates through this nation’s virulent anti-intellectualism. One of its manifestations is that Americans discourage meaningful conversation. They prefer talking in incessant platitudes and trivialities. So when someone pipes up with “I think these spree shootings point to a more intrinsic societal problem . . . ,” you are bound to get scoffed at or mocked. Otherwise, you might be accused of cynicism, despite being the guy who is actually trying to help an increasingly desperate situation.

Before we can help, we need to recognize this problem as being firmly entrenched. Next, we need to understand the psychological dynamics at work. For one, these outbursts are driven by ressentiment: the externalization of personal resentment in an ego-driven outburst. The perpetrator first feels frustration over his perceived role as an isolated outcast, to the point of being overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness. He may then recognize his psychological descent, but feel too ashamed to seek help. The American man is not supposed to admit emotional failings, a sure sign of weakness. At this point, egoistical man, alienated and replete with feelings of resentment, becomes fatalistic man, and the rampage occurs.

The perpetrator has suspended disbelief, but so has society. The murderer believes that any consequences of his act, including death, are worth the price of achieving the ultimate release. Meanwhile, society believes that it still functions. The whole is legitimized by the foolhardiness of its incumbent parts. In this way, society echoes the madman. It externalizes its resentment of the violent act by dismissing it as aberrational. “Nature creates crazy people, and there is nothing we can do about it.” And this process continues ad infinitum. Egoistical society serves as the stage for the resentful fatalist: each mutually dependent and self-reinforcing.

Violence itself is undoubtedly a part of the problem, but only insofar as it serves as release. These young men were attracted to violence because it makes the loudest bang. They probably lack the sadistic tendencies of the American troops laughing as they fired away at innocent civilians from an Apache helicopter. They do not get off on violence the same way as cops smashing a baton upon the head of a dissident or malcontent. The killing spree perpetrators have merely resigned themselves to violence. Isolated, alone, and feeling inadequate, the bloodbath is their way of coming to life.

In proactively addressing this problem, we must realize that there is no panacea, since we are dealing with a complex social issue that runs to the very foundation of the culture of this country. The solution will require changing attitudes and behavior patterns over a long period of time. It will require disempowering the petty and smug archetypes that currently prevail here. It will require fighting back against bullies of all sorts, so that the American child is not born to think that might makes right. It will require that people learn to have an appreciation for the value of intellectual rigor and thoughtful criticism. It will require that we stop living in a perpetual state of denial, wherein people sincerely believe that this is the great Hopetopia. It will require fighting back against the hyperactive ego and the attendant forces of alienation and social isolation that feed the psychological resentment that ultimately leads to this violent release. It will require that we become a more functioning society: one that proactively addresses its problems, cares for its vulnerable, salutes (rather than disparages) its dynamic members, and doesn’t occupy the bulk of its time with lecturing the remainder of the world about how great we are. In other words, we need to stop being so American, for the well being of children the world over: from Pakistan to Connecticut.

Judging from the Twitter-sphere, the presidential election is an addiction for some: akin to alcoholism, but a lot less fun. This affliction actually runs much deeper than the election itself, though it presents its symptoms most acutely in these final weeks of the bullshit extravaganza. Its subjects are likely to engage in incessantly vacuous chatter in this arrogant “have you heard?” tone. They prattle on, eventually driven to hysterics about the assured doom the country will face if their perceived foe prevails.

They fail to realize that we are already muddling through the muck. Furthermore, the election offers little chance of addressing our malaise, as issues of economy, foreign policy and national security are largely insulated from public purview. One can make a reasonable argument for voting Obama in swing states as a strategic defense move, though that is it. Otherwise, it seems that the self-professed liberal should be busying himself with social movement activism. The manifold nature of injustice in this country leaves little time for the well-intentioned to descend into the pathetic stupor of electoral obsession. From student debt relief to stopping the private prison racket to defending public schools and libraries from the ravages of austerity, we need our collective intellect and imagination focused on public betterment.

However, a large segment of liberals are not genuinely motivated by concerns of social justice. For them, politics is bourgeois social activity. They vote for Democrats as a demonstration of how cultured and swank they are. Some even use politics as a means of assuaging the guilt they feel about their position of relative privilege. This tendency descends, in large part, from Thomas Jefferson: the original American liberal. The slave-owner who decried the evils of that institution. The “small-government” advocate who helped greatly expand the size and scope of the federal government. The champion of individual rights, except for the “noble savages” in our midst. Jefferson was a walking contradiction, and so too are his ideological descendants, whom I term the “Bad Faith Liberals.”

They appear to be that which they are not: a living contrivance. On the topic of “bad faith,” Sartre alluded to the deception of the waiter at a Parisian cafe, trying too hard to play his role, herky-jerky in motion: visibly outside of his skin. He is inauthentic, but realizes this to some degree. His free will is compromised by circumstance. Perhaps the waiter fears for the security of his job if he behaves differently. The liberal, likewise, fears the consequences of making far-reaching criticisms. He knows it will jeopardize his relative comfort in the world. He fears it will alienate him from friends and family, who collectively choose to not think critically about politics. His career might suffer as well as his social status, as ours is a superficial culture where nonconformity renders one “crazy.”

This thinking represents the psychological underpinnings of authoritarianism. And have no illusions about it: this is an authoritarian country by any reasonable measure. Having the world’s highest incarceration rate is enough evidence. Further confirmation is the fact that a sizeable portion of the population believes that the rich have intrinsic qualities, and merit their wealth regardless of how it was attained. Liberals, too, believe it cliché, even trite, to suggest that social democracy might have some intellectual value. To speak of a common good renders one old-fashioned and “narrow minded.” Ours is a society that worships the rich and powerful, even to the point of providing excuse for their voracity.

This is important because politics is a reflection of society (the two do not exist in a vacuum). Our culture is obsessed with individual: from sports phenoms to movie and music stars to political figures. As such, the national conversation is generally about personalities and petty dramas rather than ideals. Meanwhile, much of what does pass for meaningful discourse amongst liberals serves merely to provide a veneer for the inherent contradiction of their existence.

The bad-faith liberal pretends to be a humanitarian, whilst actually an enabler of the American military machinery that has devastating consequences for civilian populations in affected regions. He poses as anti-racist, despite allowing for a national security policy that explicitly targets Muslim and Arab populations for special surveillance and judicial treatment. He has also permitted the proliferation of private prison gulags that prey on minority and poor populations so as to maintain a positive balance sheet. These represent just a smattering of the issues not discussed at any of the debates. Even the foreign policy debate is pure platitude, no substance. These are the realities the Blind Faith Liberals disregard, because it is easier to live a contradiction than to demonstrate the agency to address systemic injustices.

One can argue that it is unfair to pin these crimes on liberals, as they are not the primary promulgators. However, they have the capacity to do something, and have instead continued on with their merry lives. Many bourgeois liberals have yet to be significantly impacted by the economic and social decline of the country. Working-class and poor populations, largely minorities, have obviously been the most profoundly inured by the neo-liberal authoritarianism that now predominates. The bad-faith liberal has only caught a whiff thus far. Perhaps they feel the stress of a workplace that has been stripped of job security, reasonable vacation time and health care provisions. They might be joining the growing numbers of people suffering from depression and other psychological disorders associated with stress and feelings of inadequacy. Maybe their adult-age children are having problems finding jobs and making student debt payments. Nonetheless, the Bad Faith Liberal remains committed to the existent political superstructure, and his contradictory role within it.

In so doing, he undercuts his own freedom, by limiting his role to cheerleading for one side of the boxing match. The two permitted parties define themselves in opposition to one another, and this delineation ultimately encompasses the culture of the country writ large. Americans often judge one another in reference to a liberal-conservative dichotomy. The red state vs. blue state rhetoric is ubiquitous. Liberals decry gun-toting, god-fearing southerners, and conservatives complain of a threat from amorphous “outsiders.” The two sides invariably play the role assigned, out of fear of freedom. And it is ultimately this fear that unites them, together in the muck.

They keep each other down through this culture of oppositionalism. The fear breeds resentment and guilt, which leads the American to hate himself and thus his compatriot. It is this process that informs the lack of a robust social safety network in this country, as failure is almost invariably blamed solely on the individual. This further leads to a juvenile tendency to disparage and demean others for trivial and superficial reasons. The net result is the destruction of confidence and dignity, rendering the American unlikely to stand up for himself against the rapacious and regressive forces of organized money.

Indeed, the Bad Faith Liberal stands up to no one. He merely externalizes his lack of confidence through the politics of oppositionalism. He believes that the country would be better off without the angry, resentful, small-town conservative. He sees not that he shares those first two traits. If the two would overcome these drains on the soul, and speak civilly to one another, we could recommence the task of nation building in the United States. We might even regain the passion necessary to function as a democratic polity.

This requires realizing our free will. We are not cogs in a machine. We are not restrained to playing a tightly-defined role in some convoluted national narrative. We needn’t choose team red or team blue. We have the ability, like all humans, to be dynamic and thoughtful individuals. And if we demonstrate that dynamism in a collective effort aimed at addressing the ever-expanding authoritarianism in our midst, we will arise from the muck one day.

]]>99mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=502012-09-18T10:22:32Z2012-09-18T10:22:32ZFrom my perspective as a native of Chicago, alum of its public school system, and activist of various sorts, little could be more gripping than this current Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike. Normally, the intriguing tales of social movement action occur in foreign countries, involving actors that are not so personally connected to me. This one, however, hits home quite literally, as my mother is a retired Chicago Public School (CPS) teacher: one who worked for 35 years in an underserved elementary school on the city’s South Shore. There was nothing particularly flashy about her tenure nor was there meant to be. It was honorable public service: the humble work of someone who sought to do her share without taking special credit in the way Teach for Ameri-scabs seem to demand recognition for helping those “poor little minority kids.” And behind the fight over a just contract and due compensation for Mayor Rahmbo’s longer school day lies the central theme of this story: one of the last principled unions in this country is taking a stand against the ongoing effort to turn the nation’s schools into a veritable strip mall of charter schools.

The charter movement is reflective of broader trend of transforming our urban centers into playgrounds for young (mostly white) professionals seeking to pass their post-collegiate years caught up in a trendy nexus of cafes and brew pubs, with a smattering of yoga studios interspersed. The schools are largely an afterthought, as said yuppies likely intend to retreat to suburbia before having any kids: that or they will use private schools or hope their kid tests into a selective enrollment program of choice. As such, they are not overly concerned with the quality of the local public schools, which are primarily used by poor black and immigrant populations. This disconnect between various members of the population and the needs of public infrastructure represents a breakdown in community. Charter advocates have preyed on this breakdown to move in with an eye on the prize of billions of tax dollars waiting to be extracted, with enough to go around to all parties involved: for-profit charter companies, textbook publishers, test-makers, real estate interests, construction companies, and so forth.

The Emanuel administration has plans for a long-term shuttering of 80-120 public schools, with the bulk of those students ostensibly transferring over to a sloppy array of charter schools. I take some editorial liberty by inserting the word sloppy, simply because I now live in New Orleans, the charter dream city. It was here that state officials used the cover of Hurricane Katrina to Shock Doctrine the local system, chartering all but a few schools while the city lay in ruin. The resulting arrangement is a confusing collection of independent and network charters, wherein some schools fall under the state’s purview (or lack thereof) and others are governed by the city, while still others are part of the misnamed “Recovery School District.”

Behind this project was the same cast of charter advocates at work in Chicago: the Gates Foundation, the aforementioned Teach for America, a hodgepodge of Astroturf groups like “Stand for Children” and “All Children Matter,” and the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). And, I repeat, the power grab was done while the vast majority of the union staff was evacuated due to the devastation wrought by one of the worst natural disasters in this country’s history. In other words, we are up against utter scumbags in this fight. Vile, despicable scum!

On that note, let’s get back to Rahm Emanuel. Hate him all you want, I know I do, but he is actually quite a gift for the left. He is such a raving asshole that even the corporate press is showing tepid signs of support for the CTU in the current impasse. And in this era of corporate hegemony, that is quite remarkable. Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune led with this analysis:

“The measure of who won and lost in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s showdown with the Chicago Teachers Union won’t be clear until the details of the new contract emerge, but last week’s strike took some of the luster off the mayor’s self-portrait as an innovative leader brimming with new ways to solve the city’s most vexing challenges.

The long, stressful path to getting a contract in place offered a glimpse that Emanuel perhaps is not as multidimensional as he tries to appear. Repeatedly, the mayor turned to one tool: the attack.”

For good measure, the paper “balanced” the coverage with some of their typical yellow journalism: running a piece titled “CPS parents rally against strike,” which includes a video of some 8-10 people standing around barking inanely at a downtown intersection. This is quite insulting to those of us who have organized rallies with hundreds of people, and not one corporate press “reporter.”

The Sun-Times also struck a supportive tone, as columnist Mark Brown said: “If the point of going on strike is to get a better deal than you would have received without it, then the Chicago Teachers Union is already a pretty clear winner this week in its confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his school board.”

The potential agreement, which delegates will commence considering today, includes several significant concessions on the part of the city. These include a 16% pay increase over the next four years, allowing laid-off teachers the chance to be considered for new vacancies, and barring the school district from using budget shortfalls as pretext to cancel scheduled teacher raises (as the mayor threatened to do this time). What’s more, the district scaled back the level at which teacher evaluation would hinge on test scores from 50% to the state-mandated minimum of 25%. Under the plan, the union would make concessions on health care, by converting to a so-called wellness plan, wherein workers with pre-existing health issues pay higher premiums. Furthermore, laid-off teachers would be provided only six months compensation, rather than the current twelve. What’s more, the union would not be granted further grounds for taking strike action, which is now limited solely to issues of pay.

Wait, wait, wait. Did I just say that teachers are only allowed to strike over compensation!? For those who appreciate not having had to work at the age of 10, or who like their weekends and holidays, and the protections afforded by workplace safety regulations, it should seem pretty egregious that the union is currently limited to striking over pay. But this is the case, thanks to a state law enacted by the Democratic state assembly and signed by the Democratic governor last year. The same players also passed a law requiring a seemingly impossible 75% approval vote in order for the union to strike. Jonah Edelman, who heads the aforementioned pro-charter group Stand for Children, boasted at the time that the CTU would never achieve that threshold. He was shown up in June, when the union mustered an incredible 90% vote in support of the action (despite non-voters getting counted as “no’s.”)

In sum, Illinois Democrats have been minutely less offensive than Wisconsin Republicans in their attacks on organized labor. Rather than trampling collective bargaining rights altogether, they force teachers into the role of the avaricious union thugs, replete with their “Cadillac health care plans” (now on the chopping block), whining about pay in these tight economic times. Meanwhile, pro-charter activists, aided along by members of the press, widely spread the fallacy that Chicago teachers were making an average of $74,000 a year. In reality, that figure is $56,720. For new faculty or lower demand teachers (sadly, foreign language instructors . . ) the figure is significantly lower. This is roughly equivalent to the median household income throughout the country, in a city whose cost of living is 5.1% greater than the national average.

Imaging aside, the authoritarian strike law has also allowed for the mayor to set a trap, wherein he can now claim that teachers are continuing their strike illegally, since pay issues have been resolved in principle. In fact, Emanuel brashly sought an injunction Monday, though a judge refused to act prior to Wednesday, stating that the issue could become moot if the strike is resolved by then. Nonetheless, the union’s maneuverability is immensely compromised from here on, as the law simply does not allow for them to address the gamut of issues needing attention.

Prime among them, what CTU president Karen Lewis calls the “elephant in the room,” is the potential closure of 80-120 schools to make room for a New Orleans-style mass “charterization.” Authorities in Chicago probably won’t be afforded the cover of a natural disaster to implement a fire sale on that level, though Rahm does have the benefit of that incessant crisis, otherwise known as the American economy. With both parties firmly set on austerity as a “solution,” with its emphasis on union busting, privatization, and scaling back city services, the CTU is probably in for a long-term fight.

It is certainly encouraging that they stood firm, unlike practically every other union in this country. However, until we have a viable third (and fourth- and fifth – ) party capable of capturing appreciable levels of power, union militancy will be sorely limited by the oppressive laws of the two parties of the 1%. Furthermore, it will be difficult to maintain the support of the public, with a popular press that is the mockery of the Western World. While the proliferation of “alternative press” online does help, too much of those options remain loyal to the Democratic Party establishment, and are simply not having the valuable conversations we need about how to move on from the Rahm’s and Obama’s of the world. I couldn’t be more with the teachers than I stand today, but I hope they realize that there remains a long, hard road ahead.

]]>13mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=452012-07-26T17:37:20Z2012-07-26T01:31:43ZLast Friday’s Batman rampage has provoked the same inane chatter that typically follows one of these. The president claims to be shocked, though he can’t possibly be as aghast as his subjects are about the burgeoning drone program. Meanwhile, we see the same vacuous moral posturing from “left” and “right.”. Liberals prattle on about loose gun laws and violence in movies, whilst conservatives speak about the loss of religious values and the decline of the family. Very few people are willing to point to a general societal malaise, even after 20 or so of these outbursts since Columbine. This is because the prevailing personality on these shores is ego-driven to the core: so caught up in personal pursuits as to be unaware of the distress in their midst. The first tragedy, then, is the violent act, and the second is the unresponsiveness of society. Both of these are rooted in a hyperactive ego, aggravated by the forces of alienation, de-socialization and the heightened automation of American existence.

James Holmes (Photo: Donkey Hotey / Flickr)

While many trumpet the primacy of the American individual, life is actually quite contrived here. Choice has been whittled down to a handful of corporate options, no matter what product or service you desire. And the choice of personalities is even starker. The younger generations are forced to select between a few brutal archetypes: jocks and nerds for boys, princesses and tomboys for girls. We can forgive the immature mind for such a narrow range. However, we cannot forgive the parents who fail to imbue a greater depth of perception in their children.

Naturally, no one wants to be the fuddy duddy. Thus, Americans spend their teens and 20’s fixated on being “cool”: an obsession partially promulgated and easily manipulated by corporate interests. That was always the essence of MTV: marketing a monolithic image of what it means to be accepted in this country. It is the most vulgar form of conformity masquerading as individuality. The free spirit of the American youth is just as much a sham as the worker’s utopia of the Soviet Union: pure propaganda.

We are no more individualistic than our counterparts throughout the West. Not to worry: we have them beat on a whole host of other measures, such as waist-lines, decibel level of speech, and insincerity of expression. All of these traits stem from the predominance of ego, right down to the bulging bellies. The American desires his dominance over a domain. Hence his particular vulnerability at the hands of the swindling mortgage brokers of Wall Street, who preyed on the retrograde commodity fetish of the suburban abode. The fatalistic ego, driven by the “will to power,” as Nietzche sees it, describes the contemporary United States. Its citizens see personal success and wealth as the prime attributes, and have generally retained naïve faith in the economic system to reward the most virtuous.

The disease of Western egoism is far more widespread than these shores, to be sure, but this is the epicenter. It is here where social frustration occasionally boils over in an otherwise properly functioning person, compelling him to go and spray a few hundred rounds of ammo at an unsuspecting audience. He sees a culture ravished by expressions of ego, wherein boisterousness is encouraged above all. James Holmes and VT killer Seung-Hui Cho were both described as introverted to the extreme. They each felt excluded on account of their personalities. This culture makes life difficult on introverts, as well as those that are simply more measured in approach: men are supposed to be loud, cocky and inane. They are meant to engage in fiery, yet baseless, chatter, yelling over one another in uncivilized fashion. The soundtrack of America is the noise of bad conversation: the subjects speak louder and louder until the tortured introvert provides the crescendo.

This violent outburst is driven by ressentiment: the externalization of personal resentment in an ego-driven outburst. The American believes in leaving a legacy. Typically, one’s destiny is finding a realm within which you thrive, and then achieving much wealth and recognition in that métier. When life fails to follow the determined script, some will naturally grow frustrated. Couple this frustration with an intense feeling of alienation and the subject becomes overridden with helplessness. They may then recognize their psychological descent, but feel too ashamed to seek help. The American man is not supposed to admit emotional failings, a sure sign of weakness. At this point, egoistical man, alienated and replete with feelings of resentment, becomes fatalistic man, and the rampage occurs. The process of leaving the legacy is complete.

The perpetrator has suspended disbelief, but so has society. The murderer believes that any consequences of his act, including death, are worth the price of achieving the ultimate release. Meanwhile, society believes that it still functions. The whole is legitimized by the foolhardiness of its incumbent parts. In this way, society echoes the madman. It externalizes its resentment of the violent act by dismissing it as aberrational. “Nature creates crazy people, and there is nothing we can do about it.” And this process continues ad infinitum. Egoistical society serves as the stage for the resentful fatalist: each mutually dependent and self-reinforcing.

Violence itself is a significant part of the problem, but only insofar as it serves as release. These young men were attracted to violence because it makes the loudest bang. They probably lack the sadistic tendencies of the American troops laughing as they fired away at innocent civilians from an Apache helicopter. They do not get off on violence the same way as cops smashing a baton upon the head of a dissident or malcontent. The killing spree perpetrators have merely resigned themselves to violence. Isolated, alone, and feeling inadequate, the bloodbath is their way of coming to life.

There are millions of others holding similar feelings of resentment and despair. Thankfully, most of them find ways to channel their frustrations into something constructive, like art, activism, or finding the Higgs Boson. Others take solace in the bottom of the bottle.

Either way, misery is widespread on these shores. When I first returned to the states after four years away in France, I could literally see the stress steaming off of people. The population is worried, isolated and fearful. They live from one gasp of breath to the next, incessantly focused on petty notions of social status and economic wealth. They see themselves as music or movie stars, while simultaneously believing they might be utterly worthless. The hyperactive ego causes exaggerated bouts of self-importance and self-loathing in quick succession. It is in this unstable framework that the American operates. As such, “shocking” is the least appropriate word to describe someone going bat-shit crazy. But the President knows that. He is just playing his role as utterer of drivel in this wounded society.

]]>19mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=392012-07-16T17:27:48Z2012-07-16T07:11:52ZIn a rather imprudent attempt at provocation by lefty commentator Alexander Cockburn on the Counterpunch site last week, he declares the Occupy movement dead, and then proceeds into full-fledged hissy-fit, saying of the movement: “There were . . . features that I think quite a large number of people found annoying: the cult of the internet, the tweeting and so forth, and I definitely didn’t like the enormous arrogance which prompted the Occupiers to claim that they were indeed the most important radical surge in living memory.”

I have personally always enjoyed his prose, owing largely to his willingness to criticize conventional wisdom on the left end of the spectrum. His vilification of the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Eric Alterman have been simply priceless. Even when he adopts an opinion I find reprehensible, as with his denials of anthropomorphic climate change, he raises sound points that merit attention. I understand the impetus to criticize: he is right to say “new movements always need a measure of cynicism dumped on them.” However, that is not what he is doing here. He is merely bitching. As with his now-weekly dung cart of (mostly) Americanisms that he and other Counterpunchers resent ever entering the English lexicon, he comes off as pompous and out of touch. In so doing, he has accentuated a noteworthy generational fissure at the core of this movement.

Those who characterize Occupy as narrowly concerned with inequality and malfeasance on Wall Street have it wrong. Rhetoric about the evil crooks amongst the 1% is simply convenient fodder for the chattering masses. Even Cockburn admits to the success of the 99% slogan. However, by admonishing the movement for not being ready with emergency mass actions in response to the latest financial scandal in the U.K., he demonstrates a misunderstanding of what the movement is. This is not a thriving bureaucracy waiting to pounce the minute scandal breaks with a new round of encampments, marches, and battle with the police. The movement is definitively organic. It is a raw expression of the frustration of a precarious generation. As such, it continues the European movements of the last ten years against tuition hikes, worsening employment conditions for young workers, and horrendous job prospects for the recently graduated. While I lived in France, students took to the streets in opposition to then-president Chriac’s new employment contract for under-25’s, but broadly spoke of La précarité as cause to organize.

This is about a social and economic system that seems to have been fatalistically designed to not provide for anyone much younger than the baby boomer. It is as if the West promised it would never repeat the insanity of the mid-20th century, only to blunder its way into an increasingly bleak outlook for the mid-21st century. Francis Fukuyama captured l’espirit du temps with the declaration of the “End of History.” After thousands of years of human civilization, his generation had found the right way to organize the world. This logic is rooted in the smug determinism of the enlightenment together with the naïve belief in the perpetually progressive nature of the human condition. I see no difference between Fukuyama’s pseudo-scholarship and a cranky old lefty plodding into an Occupy GA only to deride the lack of “a plan,” before retreating to the writer’s den, anxiously awaiting the opportune moment to declare the whole thing dead.

What a cowardly act, reflective of a ruling elite that declared the entire generation dead on arrival. What can I do to impart to Cockburn and other great sages of the elder generation that us young people feel effectively powerless? The Generation Y crowd that dominates every Occupy gathering is resentful of having been deprived the dignity of adulthood. Many have literally had to face the humiliation of returning to their parent’s basements, desperately trying to scrape together enough by serving pizzas to get their own apartment. Meanwhile, rents have not come down to reality, instead driven upward by the pressures of thousands of former homeowners unleashed on the renters’ market after the scheming banks seized their property. Additionally, the student loan bills arrive monthly: a seemingly insurmountable burden that this country’s retrograde policymakers deemed non-dischargeable in bankruptcy court last decade, despite an ever-growing percentage of student debt being serviced by those same miscreants of finance whose greed gave birth to Occupy.

So naturally Wall Street is a convenient focal point of the ire of this generation, but the resentment goes further. Around Occupy meetings, one often hears expressed animosity toward the ostensibly liberal members of the baby boomer generation. Many occupiers have liberal parents: it is no accident they came to be free-thinking individuals. However, their parents have proven incapable of doing anything to help the situation, and this breeds resentment. Some of their parents have assured them that voting Obama would change things, and the fallacy of that thought process has bred resentment. I have seen visible hostility directed at some of the older members of the local Occupy camp in New Orleans: some of it reasonably well founded, and some of it thoroughly gratuitous in nature. In the latter case, this hostility is rooted in a resentment of a baby boomer generation that collectively left its children powerless, undignified and indignant.

The baby boomer arrives at a GA wanting to share organizing stories and tactics from an era where they were treated with a modicum of respect. Chris Hedges cannot fathom why some members of this generation feel compelled to yell “Fuck the Police” whilst marching alongside hundreds of storm trooper goons. Chris the circumspect wants us to know that his generation discovered that civility pays off. We have heard the same from Todd Gitlin, though the latter has failed to scribe much of anything worthwhile, while Hedges was mostly respectful until his now -infamous rant about the “ruinous” Black Bloc. These men populated a generation where you could be left of Kissinger and still get a job with the New York Times. You could even be Bill Ayers and get rewarded tenure after helping to organize an explicitly violent bombing campaign against targets symbolizing the evil capitalist state. It is simply difficult to endure lectures from their generation when we couldn’t so much as get a job answering customer service calls if a cursory Google search unveils even slightly radical tendencies on our part. Nor could we get said crap job if our bloodstream is found to contain just a tiny bit of narcotic, ingested to help cope with this excessively stressful reality.

We are told to maintain composure and minimize passion so as to preserve credibility with “mainstream society.” In a recent article I published at Alternet about the NATO protests in Chicago, a few readers commented that I ought “stick to the facts.” The article was not laced with innuendo or hyperbole. In my view, the critical commentary was appropriate for the realities we face as members of a movement that has been the victim of violent police repression, in addition to clandestine infiltration. To do anything but report passionately about the ongoing spirited effort to address the violence of the 1% corporate-state apparatus would strain credulity. Like it or not, the fact is that this is a horribly unjust country, obnoxiously operating under the guise of being a “beacon of peace.” And Occupy is the most compelling movement forcefully exposing this fraud.

If the movement has seemed slow to concoct definitive “plans,” that is a function of the manifold nature of the injustices we face. Wall Street is an apt starting point because it represents so much of what is wrong: rampant greed, selfishness, and total lack of morality. However, even if Wall Street were subject to a robust regulatory regime, we would still be living in a barbaric society. We would still find ourselves un- and under- employed, lacking in job security and comprehensive health care, still up to our eyeballs in student debt, and subject to the most offensive incarceration regime the world over.

There is no panacea. The work ahead is tedious and cumbersome. What’s more, we face a society that has been made to eschew reasoned argument. Anti-intellectualism has run rampant in a culture still smitten with trash on television. Appealing to “mainstream society” is particularly challenging because it has such a shallow understanding of the ravenous forces at work.

Rather than pronouncing the movement dead, it might behoove Cockburn to contribute his talent to it. Otherwise, the movement will justifiably perceive him as another elder lacking a grasp of the tenuous reality of young people in the great époque of the 1%.

]]>39mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=362012-04-06T01:09:33Z2012-04-06T01:08:48ZLouisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has wasted no time this legislative session in pushing wide-reaching education reforms designed to expand the charter school footprint, while opening the door to vouchers and tying teacher tenure to student test results. In the early hours of the morning on March 23rd, after a marathon session, the Louisiana State House passed two bills that form the core of a wide-reaching education reform agenda designed to expand the charter school footprint, while opening the door to vouchers and tying teacher tenure to student test results. Governor Bobby Jindal wasted no time in pushing these reforms through in the first weeks of the legislative session, and the urgency with which he has advanced this agenda has infuriated teachers and left even some charter-school advocates alarmed. “The governor’s expression of urgency for these bills is specious at best. [They] did not have to be passed under cover of darkness,” says Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT) president Steve Monaghan. Even Senator Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who has been an avid charter school advocate, criticized the Governor’s haste: “I am by no means naïve, and know full well the Administration’s political advantage of pushing legislation through with as little debate as possible.” With these bills, Louisiana is set to join Florida, Ohio and Minnesota amongst the states that have enacted the most far-reaching of these school reforms. This marks the latest wave in a concerted nation-wide effort by right-wing advocacy organizations and their corporate supporters to ravage the public sector.

The last tidal wave of reform occurred in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when authorities circumvented the process of debate by deliberating while large swaths of the population were still displaced. The changes enacted during that “Emergency Session” of the state legislature allowed for the vast majority of New Orleans’ public schools to be brought under the state-administered Recovery School District (RSD), which, in turn, facilitated the process of turning over management to private charters. In the meantime, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) was effectively eviscerated, as the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) fired the entirety of its teaching staff after losing control of the bulk of its schools. Over the next few years, New Orleans became the nation’s first majority charter city: a bona fide model for school “reformers” keen on extending the “school choice” doctrine to the rest of the country.

The current legislative initiative will effectively spread the New Orleans model to the rest of the state, while loosening administrative checks on charter governance and opening up a new arena of unaccountable education providers via the voucher program. This is part of a nation-wide process of special interests and right wing zealots promulgating legislation designed to attack one of the few remaining public pillars of this society. Their goal now is turning Louisiana into its pet project. Far from becoming a model for thoughtful school reform, the state is set to become an example of the havoc wreaked when elite interests are allowed to run rampant over the democratic process.

In attempting to identify the instigators of this agenda, the story begins and ends with the shadowy American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conduit between corporate boardrooms and elected officials willing to enact their agenda of austerity and privatization. The non-profit evades lobby disclosure requirements by presenting itself as an advocate of rather innocuous ends: “the Jeffersonian principles of free markets, limited government, federalism, and individual liberty,” according to their website. In reality, their initiatives stick to a neo-liberal orthodoxy reminiscent of the structural adjustment programs long imposed on the global south by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank. As the economic elite has seen its supply of exploitable poor countries dry up, they have refocused their attention on the United States, using mechanisms like ALEC as to help enact many of the same policies on states with governors and legislators firmly in their pocket. These policies include prison privatization, stripping collective bargaining rights, reducing or eliminating environmental protections, and enacting regressive tax laws.

Louisiana has been a principal focal point of ALEC’s education agenda in recent years, as best evinced in the decision to hold their annual meeting in the soupy August heat of New Orleans last year. Governor Jindal led a plenary session at the conference, and was joined in attendance by no less than 24 members of the state House, according to source material gathered by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Among them was Noble Ellington, a recently retired Republican representative who presided as National Chairman of ALEC at the time. In an interview with Democracy Nowthat week, he stated that it did not matter that corporations amounted to such a dominant presence at the ALEC meeting, because elected officials were in attendance as well: “We represent the public and we are the ones who decide. So the tax-paying public is represented there at the table, because I’m there”.

That model might work if the taxpayer were the politician’s sole benefactor. However, campaign disclosure records show that some 50 members of the state House together raised more than $500,000 in campaign funds from ALEC member corporations during the last cycle. This fact alone ought serve as sufficient evidence of the foolhardiness of Ellington’s characterization of lawmakers as independent arbiters. However, yet more proof is immediately available on the home page for the Louisiana Legislature. There, one finds a link to the ALEC website: an outrageous illustration of how embedded corporate governance has become. That someone thought it remotely appropriate to put the link in place and no one else found it potentially offensive speaks to a widespread acceptance of the primacy of business interests in the public sector. The political elite sees no inherent problem with a bargaining table composed of corporations, the politicians they support with vast campaign largesse, and an empty chair where the public ought be.

After all, removing the public from the public is precisely the intent of these reforms. The initial wave followed a devastating crisis, a la Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine,” and ensuing reforms have effectively institutionalized the crisis in Louisiana. This has been achieved by keeping the system in a perpetual state of flux. Schools are constantly opening, closing or changing hands, teacher retention rates are exceedingly low, and a number of different government authorities vie for oversight within the same geographic area. Just understanding the organizational flow of the New Orleans public school system is a tall task. There are 16 schools under the direct management of the state-run Recovery School District (RSD), and 49 charters that fall under the state’s purview at the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE). 26 of these charters belong to five separate networks that manage multiple schools, while the other 23 are part of independent non-network charters. Meanwhile, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) oversees nine non-network charters, and another two that are part of the same charter network as five schools that fall under the purview of the BESE. Meanwhile, the OPSB retains direct management of six schools: down from over 100 before Katrina hit.

Furthermore, the policy of tying teacher tenure to standardized test performance has added to this instability by greatly reducing teacher retention. A quick glance at empirical data on the number of first year teachers is quite revealing on this point. A recently published report by the Louisiana Board of Education (LBOE) provides this demographic information for the 2009-2010 school year. In the charter heavy RSD (37 of 70 total are charters), 619 of 2,237 teachers were in their first year. That comes out to roughly 27.7%, compared to a statewide rate of 10.7%. If the teacher tenure reforms accomplish anything, it is keeping the revolving door of personnel moving.

The continuous flow of new teachers is largely provided by non-profits like Teach for America and Teach Nola, each of which have supplied hundreds of rookie instructors since Katrina. These donor-subsidized salaries result in considerably lower cost to the state and charter operators, which many critics would surmise to be the primary intent of these reforms: chopping public sector salaries under the guise of improving the quality of education.

Teachers’ unions view the changes as a direct threat to the integrity of their vocation. The Louisiana Federation of Teachers’ (LFT) Director of Public Relations, Les Landon, spoke with me on this theme in particular: “We’re very concerned about what we see as the de-professionalization of teaching.” He raised the issue of removing the requirement that teachers be certified as one example of the move in this direction. However, the reliance on test results received the bulk of his criticism. He said: “Almost every decision on a teacher’s professional life is going to be based on student test scores. We think that’s a pretty terrible idea . . . What they are basically doing is trying to say that anybody can teach as long as you can get children to fill out the right bubbles on the test form.”

In that vein, New Orleans charters have fared better than their counterparts elsewhere in demonstrating measurable improvement in test scores. A study last year by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) showed that half of New Orleans’ charter schools were improving at a rate “significantly faster” than equivalent traditional schools. This broke with the national trend that showed charter schools performing slightly worse than their traditional counterparts. However, critics in New Orleans point to an inherent structural advantage on the part of charters. For example, some charters are selective enrollment, and most special-needs kids continue to enroll in traditional public schools. Furthermore, an achievement gap exists among charter schools, suggesting a replication of the same divisions long seen in traditional public schools.

What’s more, Landon argues that the current reforms will reverse any gains made in New Orleans’ charter system by eradicating the prevailing system of accountability. He explained that the CREDO study found that “the New Orleans charter schools were doing well because there was strict accountability on the issuance of charters . . . The Governor’s agenda this year virtually erases (this).” He notes that schools will no longer be required to provide fiscal reports with the LBOE, and instead will direct these reports to “charter authorizers.” These could be non-profit or corporate entities that create at least five charter schools, and then take over the oversight role currently assigned to the district. He is very candid on the implication of this reform: “What this bill does is open the floodgates to privatized education through the charter system.”

In fact, charter operators throughout the country have already proven adept at cashing in on their education endeavors. An investigative report in the Miami Herald last October unveiled a range of charter school profiteers operating under the auspices of one of the most lenient charter laws in the country (former Gov. Jeb Bush is one of the most high-profile “School Choice” advocates). The authors detail one school, “The Academy of Arts and Minds,” that has been used as a lucrative source of business for founder Manuel Alonso-Poch. He charged $900,000 a year in rent, $150,000 for providing lunch, and $90,000 for handling the financial books during the last fiscal year. According to the report, charter schools have developed a reputation for this sort of activity, to the point of even attracting the watchful eye of the IRS.

The prospect for financial gain is likely the primary motivator of some of the most vocal supporters of these reforms. A scan through the board of directors of any of a number of charter operators reveals a veritable “Who’s Who” of American Aristocracy. For example, the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP), which operates over 100 public charter schools throughout the country, boasts a significant list of billionaires. John Fisher, son of Gap clothing founders Doris and Don, sits atop as chairman. He is joined by his mother, as well as Carrie Walton Penner of the Walmart clan, Mark Nunnelly, managing director of Bain Capital, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, and Philippe Dauman, CEO of Viacom. Bill Gates has also been an active contributor to various charter reform efforts.

The education reform agenda has widespread corporate and political support, with members of both parties amongst its biggest advocates. At the highest level, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan previously oversaw an aggressive expansion of charter schools in Chicago while superintendent of that system from 2001-2009. Furthermore, he specifically lent Jindal his support for the recent appointment of state school czar John White, a charter advocate who previously managed the New Orleans system. Meanwhile, similar reforms are currently being debated from coast to coast: New Jersey, Hawaii and Washington state have seen similar legislative packages introduced during the current session. At the same time, the Florida Senate narrowly defeated a “Parent Trigger” bill last month, which would have granted parents the power to turn their children’s schools over to charters if it were failing and a majority of parents approved.

While that defeat is certainly encouraging, it is one of the few times these reforms have been beaten back, given their heavy bipartisan support. Meanwhile, the left tends to be focused elsewhere, such as bankster malfeasance, ending the imperial wars, resisting the encroaching police state, and so on. It is hard to pick one issue of “most importance,” but education should probably attract more attention. This is an issue that cuts to the soul of the country, as school plays a crucial role in cognitively programming young people. A whole generation of children are set to be molded in a savage educational environment of resentful and frightened teachers, corporate executives playing the role of school administrators, and billionaires desperately trying to cash in on a vital public service. This seems likely to create an adult population that knows only the retrograde “every man for himself” ideology. It will also wipe out a large swath of the middle class, much of it black and/or female, that populate the ranks of the unionized inner-city teaching force. It will replace them with armies of young, naive “do-gooders” from Teach for America, set on educating the “savages” of the “urban ghettos.” The new education model is replete with economically backward ideology, racism, and union-busting.

New Orleans has had seven years to see how much this system stinks. Unfortunately, the rest of the country looks set to get their turn in the near future. ALEC and other reformers will continue to push this agenda in every state of the nation, and this will not stop until they have thoroughly emasculated the public, or vice versa.

]]>3mattreichelhttp://my.firedoglake.com/members/mattreichel/http://my.firedoglake.com/mattreichel/?p=332012-01-26T00:36:51Z2012-01-25T14:00:46ZWith vague allusions to populist promises and admonition of his stubborn Republican opposition, the Great Capitulator ramped up his act like it was 2008 all over again. Memories of that agonizingly nauseating year abounded as mainstream liberals sang his praises. Among others, Michael Moore, of Ramsey Clark endorsement fame, was live on twitter with this: “Let’s give him an A- on this one. He lost points for saying that the IraqWar has made us “safer” & “more respected” around the world.” He gets just a minor reduction there for completely losing the “insight” he once claimed to have about the Iraq War being misguided, but otherwise gets Moore’s approval.

It is absolutely confounding how liberals have repeatedly fallen for this president. He has thrived off of vague pronouncements and innuendo, only making concrete political promises on issues with overwhelming popular support, at which point he generally manufactures some semblance of fight before rolling over dead in quick order. How many years of this before the Michael Moore’s of the world get it? The problem is not that the president’s hands are tied by an overzealous Republican establishment; rather, he is confined to a contrived role in a rigged political act designed to mimic representative democracy. The script goes like this: he postures as the people’s president, while the opposition scolds him as being a liberal elitist. Then, they bicker about all things innocuous, while carrying on unabated with the core business of shredding the constitution, stifling dissent, and maintaining the Empire. Obama’s new vaguely populist rhetoric and seemingly forceful tone is all a bad rerun. The Washington Post declared this to be the emergence of “Obama 2.0,” but they got it wrong. It’s all the same Hope and Change Pony Show.

With each year of Obama’s successful duping of the liberal establishment, the center-point of accepted political opinion gets driven further to the right. In this address, he bills his two greatest accomplishments as getting Bin Laden and saving GM: an extrajudicial murder and a bailout conditioned with wage and benefit reductions for future employees. He blithely touted his circumvention of international law and due process in the bin Laden killing. Meanwhile, he goes on to trumpet his saber rattling vis-à-vis Iran, and his illegal use of drones in Pakistan and Yemen, while speaking of an “ironclad – and I mean Ironclad” relationship to the contemptible regime in Israel. It is quite disconcerting to know that respected “”liberal” commentators could characterize a speech as “populist” despite all of this dastardly retrograde rhetoric.

The praise did not stop with Michael Moore. David Corn from the once respectable Mother Jones had this to say: “Obama is pitching a patriotic, quasi-populist progressivism (while conceding the need for deficit reduction and government cost-efficiencies). Either he doesn’t quite get the concept of “quasi” or we can count him in the ranks of the duped. In his coverage on Twitter he said: “Progressives can get too bogged down in critique. Obama showed how to criticize while reaching higher.” While it is difficult to discern from a 140-letter tweet, the thrust of this statement seems to be that far-reaching critiques are not acceptable. His reasoning goes that ideologues are archaic and inherently divisive. Anyone who breaks with the theme of unity is a party pooper. In taking this line, the president and his supporters conflate reasoned dissent with the knee-jerk rejectionist posture of the outrageous Republican establishment. Those that demand “too much” of the president are viewed with equal contempt by the increasingly base liberal establishment.

What these candy-ass liberals fail to understand is that we cannot be united with a 1% whose recklessness and avidity knows no bounds. The super-rich have unequivocally demonstrated that their interests lie elsewhere. They have spent decades lobbying for deregulation and trade “liberalization” that has allowed them to displace millions of American jobs while reducing the quality of millions of others. Meanwhile, they preyed on working Americans with their sub-prime and Adjustable Rate Mortgages, and then shook the whole house of cards by repackaging those lousy investments into fancy financial instruments, thus provoking a recession that is ongoing for most of the 99% of us. The Occupy Movement grew out of rage against these monsters, not out of any desire to move in with them. A responsive and thoughtful president would be railing against them, not tidily talking about a “togetherness” that the 1% has incessantly rejected.

Nonetheless, liberals will argue that the president adequately addressed inequality with his token references to economic fairness and his advocacy of a Buffet Tax. The latter proposal is quite clearly a ploy on his part, as he knows the Republican congress would never seriously consider it. He gets to posture as a liberal without ever having to actually enact a progressive measure, per the norm. If he really had any desire to equalize the tax code, he could have done it during his first two years, when he had a strong party majority in both houses of Congress. Meanwhile, if he had the determination, he could ram through such legislation in the current climate of populist upheaval, despite the current Congress of stooges and charlatans. However, it would be extremely naïve to expect the president to suddenly cease being the servile sort that he is.

One could reasonably argue that the proposal to establish a “Financial Crimes Unit” amounts to a progressive initiative that is praiseworthy. Indeed, one cannot imagine a Republican president bothering with such a measure. However, Obama is merely building on what has been a very minimal response to the financial crisis thus far. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill barely began to scratch the surface: its primary purpose so far being that it provides government with alternative avenues to taxpayer bailouts should banks face liquidity issues in the future. The more far-reaching and prescient reforms, such as resurrection of Glass-Steagall and breaking up the monolithic corporate banks, have not been serious policy considerations by this administration.

That makes two progressive-leaning proposals, delivered in the president’s typically vague form, all set for future abandonment. Meanwhile, you can add his support for fracking and “school choice” to the list of regressive positions in this State of the Union. On the former issue, he calls for an ambitious increase in the refinement of natural gas. Despite widespread documentation of the hazards posed to drinking water and the preponderance of disease in and around gas fields, Obama decided to tell the nation: “The development of natural gas will create jobs and power trucks and factories that are cleaner and cheaper, proving that we don’t have to choose between our environment and our economy.” On “school choice,” a moniker for school privatization via charters or vouchers, he elicits inspiration from his home-state’s treasured political icon: “I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That Government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States.” Here, he is merely repeating talking points directly from corporate lobbyists that have used school choice as cover for their efforts to attack public schools, break up teachers unions, and to maliciously profit from the newly burgeoning education “industry.” Obama does suggest willingness to “stop teaching to the test,” though this is probably more of his vacuous pandering to common progressive causes. He might make a half-hearted effort at some aesthetic change, but will do nothing to stave off the ongoing looting of the public schools. With Arne Duncan, the old Chicago Charter School champion, still serving as Secretary of Education, it is tough to imagine any diversion from the current privatization thrust.

The only rational conclusion from this year’s speech is that this is, indeed, the same old Obama. This is the same unrepentant militarist that was elected in 2008, the same prosecutor of illegal wars in Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen; the same authoritarian that signed the NDAA, thus codifying his immoral and unconstitutional detention powers; the same murderer of American civilians: the president who has dutifully played his role as supervisor of this descendant and morally decaying power. As this has yet to become a full-fledged dictatorship, the president must appeal to his subjects’ finer sensibilities on occasion. In this, he excels. Even after three years of the same old dog and pony show, he is still proving adept at duping the diffident liberal mainstream.

Ahead of the overlapping G-8 and NATO summits in Chicago May 19th-21st Mayor Rahm Emanuel has ramped up the repression of principled dissent in a city that has quite the history of it. Just three months after closing down Occupy Chicago before it could even develop an overnight encampment, “Rahmbo” has introduced two new ordinances that would overhaul the city’s existing laws dealing with protests and parades. Dubbed by Occupy Chicago as the “Sit Down and Shut Up” ordinance, the measures include increased fines for resisting arrest, reduced opening hours for public parks, and much stricter parade regulations. Together, they are widely seen as an effort to stifle free speech under the guise of defending the public from unwieldy “anarchists.”

The mayor is keen on avoid adversity around meetings designed to elevate the status of a city long bent on shaking its “Second City” image. On the heels of Obama’s election in 2008, Chicago’s political establishment has sought to parlay their electoral triumph into a watershed moment for the city’s economic elite. After a disastrously failed Olympics bid, these twin meetings present the best opportunity to “showcase our extraordinary city to the world,” as Emanuel puts it. However, if these measures are any indication, it is Chicago’s shameful tradition of political repression that will be drawing all of the attention around the summits.

One ordinance ups the minimum fine for resisting arrest from $25 to $200, while the other adds an array of inordinately burdensome filing requirements to the existing parade law . Examples of the new obligations in the second ordinance include a mandate that organizers account for all “recording equipment, sound amplification equipment, banners, signs, or other attention-getting devices to be used in connection with the parade” at least a week prior. Furthermore, organizers will be required to appoint one “parade marshal” for every 100 participants.

As such, the ordinance does not draw a distinction between festival parades and political marches, which is obscene given that it is virtually impossible to accurately predict the number of participants in the latter, let alone control who might show up with a banner or a bullhorn. Compliance with the stipulations of this ordinance will be virtually impossible, and, yet, violations will see minimum fines increase 20-fold from $50 to $1000.

The mayor initially described the changes as temporary measures designed to address the presumed influx of protesters from throughout the world, though organizers adeptly noticed that the ordinances’ language would suggest otherwise. In fact, the only temporary change is the stipulation regarding the related spending authority. When the inconsistency was raised to Emanuel in a Press Conference, he replied: “I misspoke, and I take responsibility for the confusion.” However, protest organizers believe he made no “mistake,” and instead was intentionally being misleading.

One organizer, Andy Thayer, told me: “This thing was permanent right from the start. He wanted to sneak it through like (the city’s parking meter privatization) by introducing it just before Christmas.” He sees the rule changes as less about maintaining order during the meetings and more about silencing oppositional voices: “They are using this to harass people with messages that they don’t like.” He went on to describe this as a “thuggish” move on Emanuel’s part, reminiscent of the behavior of his predecessor, the second Richard Daley.

The continuity in political character comes despite vapid campaign promises about changing course. In winning the first Daley-free election since 1987, he said he would usher in “the most open, accountable, and transparent government that the City of Chicago has ever seen.” This is about the equivalent of Theo Epstein promising to create the greatest Cubs team of all time. The bar has not exactly been set very high, as local investigative reporter Mick Dumke relates: “Mayor Daley’s greatest exercise in transparency was his decision to publicly disclose every Freedom of Information Act request submitted to the city. When he announced the initiative, Daley could hardly stop giggling long enough to claim it was about opening up government, not fucking with reporters (ibid).”

While Emanuel has published city worker salaries online along with information on the money trail of City Hall lobbyists, local reporters are insistent that he has maintained the Daley tradition of secrecy. David Kidwell of the Tribune explains: “City officials routinely invoke the legal right to a two-week extension to comply with records requests, only to reject them. Weeks of negotiations may follow. Like the game “Battleship” where players try to guess the location of hidden ships, officials frequently ask that requests be narrowed and then respond that such records don’t exist.” Meanwhile, the administration has rendered reporting more difficult by trimming the support staff charged with press communication as part of his austerity budget. Obtaining any information outside of carefully spun drivel has become increasingly difficult in Chicago.

However, as worrisome as the lack of transparency is, the ramping up of political repression is even more bothersome, especially given the city’s brutal history. Many of the current protest organizers were involved in anti-war organizing in 2003, when 900 people were arrested in a march that took to the iconic Lake Shore Drive on the day the Iraq war began. Still other organizers were around when the original Boss Daley deployed thousands of Chicago police officers and members of the Illinois National Guard on peaceful protesters during the Democratic National Convention of 1968. One veteran of that episode from the city’s past is Don Rose, who made the following comment to the Sun-Times regarding Emanuel’s actions: “I was one of the organizers when the whole world was watching (in ’68), and I see some unfortunate parallels here. The more pugnacious the city behaves, the more pugnacious they can expect as a response. This can be done peacefully. But mass repression appears to be on the threshold, and the city should be well beyond that by now .”

The city has proven incapable of shaking a history of repression that dates back to the origins of May Day, the international workers’ holiday, in 1886. That May 4th, a pipe bomb went off during a rally at Haymarket Square, provoking a violent police response that resulted in eight dead from amongst their own ranks, in addition to an unknown number of civilians. In the hysteria that followed, eight of the labor organizers were tried for inciting riot, and seven were sentenced to death. Five were ultimately murdered at the gallows, most notably Albert Parsons, who saw his pending execution as a state crime of passion. He said:

“You ask me why sentence of death should not be pronounced upon me, or, . . . ask me why you should give me a new trial in order that I might establish my innocence and the ends of justice be subserved. I answer you and say that this verdict is born in passion, nurtured in passion, and is the sum totality of the organized passion of the city of Chicago.”

This is a passion that continues to rage in the city today, stoked by the incendiary words of authorities. Chicago Fraternal Order of Police president Michael Shields has warned that the anti-G8/NATO protests attract a “bunch of wild, anti-globalist anarchists.” He further explained: “These aren’t 14-year-old kids running wild downtown stealing iPhones. These are people who travel around the world as professional anarchists and rioters. We’re concerned not only for the safety of our own Chicago police officers but for the safety of citizens of Chicago and the security of local business properties.”” CPD superintendant Garry McCarthy has, for his part, spoken of preparations being made for “mass arrests.” He also says that his 12,000 strong force will go to 12-hour shifts that weekend, so that a third of the department could be devoted to policing the protests. Furthermore, the new ordinances allow for McCarthy to deputize additional officers from an array of public and private sources. The prospect of rent-a-cops, hired in an atmosphere of inflammatory provocation by authorities, in a city with a violently repressive past, is disconcerting to say the least.

In many ways, the standoff being orchestrated by the power elite of Chicago is a microcosm of larger political processes ongoing in the United States. The planned protests in the Windy City mirror the larger Occupy movement insofar as both address the concentration of political and economic power in a dwindling few hands. They both take exception to the fact that the world’s agenda is being set by a small group of leaders that have taken “austerity” as their principle cause in combating the current crisis of finance capital. NATO and the G-8 are the international manifestations of American military and political power, respectively. They are specifically designed to represent the agenda of the 1%, and so they should naturally draw the attention of the Occupy movement. Realizing this, Rahm made sure that Occupy Chicago was never permitted to blossom as in other cities, hoping to deflate potential protest in May.

As the architect of the Obama presidency and the DLC that preceded it, Emanuel is the standard-bearer of the new Democratic Party. His ruthlessness is but a symbol of a party that has abandoned any meaningful connection to its “New Deal” past, whilst embracing the neo-liberal agenda of the international financial and monetary organizations that the G-8 embodies. The Clinton White House began by enacting “welfare reform” and NAFTA, while Obama has been an invariable titan of Wall Street interests, having waltzed into Washington with the wealthiest presidential campaign ever assembled. While maintaining this country’s imperialist military posture in the Middle East, he has vastly expanded its covert missions and use of drone warfare. Meanwhile, he has repeatedly placed entitlement programs on the chopping block under the guise of “compromise” with an outrageous Republican Party establishment. Furthermore, he has overseen historical executive overstep, by approving of the indefinite detention and even assassination of American citizens suspected of “terrorism.”

The truth is that the rise in political repression has nothing to do with “terrorism” and everything to do with elite fears about public response to their enforced austerity regime. As state and municipal governments, including Chicago’s, have ravaged the public commons by laying off teachers, cutting library hours, and slashing other vital services, the American people have begun pushing back in captivating fashion. As in 1968, there is a great democratic awakening ongoing in this country, as well as a vicious response from above.

Judging from Emanuel’s plans, Chicago looks headed for a repeat of history. While the ordinances are still up for a city council vote on Thursday, this assembly has proven itself to be a marked nonentity time and time again. The austerity budget now in force passed with a 50-0 vote last year in an altogether pathetic display of political subservience. Nonetheless, protest organizer Andy Thayer believes that organizers could build the momentum necessary to sway the council to a “no” vote. He says “the only way you can stop things like this in Chicago is to do a full court press.” For starters, the Sun-Times found three potential dissenting aldermen in a report January 12th by Fran Spielman: Michele Smith, Scott Waguespack, and Ameya Pawar. However, it is hard to envision these three growing to over half of the council. In reality, this seems headed for another “rubber stamp.”

With the help of his enabler alderman, Emanuel will mirror his friend Obama in the oval office by egregiously expanding executive power. Meanwhile, these two will converge in Chicago to wine and dine the world’s military, political and economic elite. While they aim to elevate the profile of their hometown, it looks like they are only going to showcase the city’s authoritarian past and present.